A Tyranny of the Mind — Killings in Niger and Las Vegas

If there is a mass shooting and anyone is asked where, the answer is likely to be the United States. The reason of course is the easy availability of guns, even guns that fire like machine guns. The Second Amendment allows the ‘right to bear arms’ — to prevent tyranny say the proponents. Yet, the world has moved beyond guns for the tyranny we face today is a tyranny not of guns but of the mind.

Psychiatrists say the psychosis gene, if present, expresses itself in the twenties or sixties. The Las Vegas shooter, a self-made millionaire, was 64, the San Bernardino pair 28 and 29. Unless they have previously sought medical help and labeled dangerous, guns can easily and legally be bought by such disturbed people.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, Senator Diane Feinstein introduced a bill banning “bump stock” weapons — an adaptation allowing machine-gun-like rapid fire — but it was defeated in the Senate. So if you are a nutcase seeking ultimate renown, the U.S. welcomes you with weapons of your choice including machine guns. Note, however, the country’s president has already topped you: he is threatening to nuke North Korea. The ‘land of the free’ is also the ‘land of the freak’.

The prevailing belief that Donald Trump plans to pull out of the Iran Nuclear agreement might have been the final catalyst for the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Norway. It awarded it to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Unlike Aung San Suu Kyi or Barack Obama, it at least is not going to dim its luster and blacken the award.

That war, so glorified in history, does not have an equivalent honor seems a curious omission. Of course, there are always the spoils of war, and individuals persuaded to serve as gun fodder are beribboned and bemedaled, but no Nobel War Prize. We really do not know if Alfred Nobel would have approved although surely all the promoters, the war merchants (now the military industrial complex) have enough resources. So how about something named after Henry Shrapnel, the single most devastating killer from the battlefield of his day continuing through to the artillery carnage of World War I. Awarded to the world’s most belligerent, it has interesting possibilities: For example, Barack Obama would have been among the few, the very few, holders of both the Nobel and the Shrapnel.

Likely aspirants are busy. On Wednesday (October 4) a joint U.S. and Niger Special Forces patrol was ambushed near the Mali border about 200km north of the capital Niamey — where the U.S. has a drone base. A second drone base costing $100 million is planned for Agadez. Now how many people in the U.S. know there are 800 men stationed in Niger, a number likely to increase as the new second drone base is readied. The drones have to be serviced, the base guarded and protected, even though the drone pilots may be sitting at a terminal back in the U.S. itself — an odious thought and a precursor of the future as people kill at the other end of the world from the safety of an arm chair in an office.

The cost of the Niger ambush: Four U.S. dead, two injured seriously enough to be flown to a base hospital in Germany. What is happening in Nigeria, Niger and Mali is a direct result of Libya’s dismemberment. Once it led Africa on the Human Development Index and kept fundamentalists in check, now it’s a hornet’s nest of factions spilling arms to Islamic extremist groups like the one that attacked the patrol in Niger. Blowback from bad policy and a growth opportunity for the U.S. Africa Command.

The U.S. has been using war as a solution to global problems and disagreements for too many years. It is a state of mind, a national disease, causing incalculable loss — countries destroyed, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, millions of lives devastated, a refugee crisis affecting European cohesion, even the recent German election, etc., and who is to say it did not affect a disturbed man in Las Vegas. Glorification of war and its inevitable heroes has its costs.

Dr. Arshad M. Khan is a former Professor based in the US. Educated at King's College London, OSU and The University of Chicago, he has a multidisciplinary background that has frequently informed his research. Thus he headed the analysis of an innovation survey of Norway, and his work on SMEs published in major journals has been widely cited. He has for several decades also written for the press: These articles and occasional comments have appeared in print media such as The Dallas Morning News, Dawn (Pakistan), The Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Monitor, The Wall Street Journal and others. On the internet, he has written for Antiwar.com, Asia Times, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, Eurasia Review and Modern Diplomacy among many. His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in its Congressional Record.

The Brazilian anti- presidentialism regime

More than a
hundred days have passed since the inauguration of the sixth elected President
of the re democratization period in Brazil, Mr. Jair Bolsonaro. Time enough to
observe that a few words of this first sentence appear not to fit together in
the current governmental term, namely, “President”, “redemocratization”, and
“Jair Bolsonaro”. In this brief article, I explain how those words are being
settled apart, through an overview of what has been at the center of media and
academic debates. Then, I show what has been the most problematic aspect of
those debates, and how they are, consequently, reinforcing the Government’s
strategy of resignifying Brazil’s history and reality. Finally, I define what I
have termed anti-presidentialist regime, erected upon such strategy which, I
argue, is the concluding part of the project presented to the population by the
Legislative and Judiciary in 2016, with Dilma Rousseff`s impeachment. My
intention here is not to assemble what several political scientists,
journalists, economists, and also the political opposition have been expressing
to the local and international presses. Instead, I aim to make sense of a
broader change regarding the way Brazilians became to recognize themselves: how
is such a shift taking place, who is it favoring, and what is the likely
outcome?

At first,
it is paramount to understand what Mr. Jair Bolsonaro is. He is more a
“something” than a “somebody”, and I explain this point:
Bolsonaro has made his path as a Congressman as a means through which to assure
to his family and his surrounding community of friends and employees safe
positions in politics. He is an instrument toward such goal and had succeeded.
This becomes clear when one analyses his performance over near thirty years in
the House of Representatives: polemic discourses in plenaries; offensive
statements directed against homosexuals and women Deputies; a poor record of
accepted propositions by his peers (two projects); and a wide range of ideas
and proposals oriented to militaries – 53% out of the total, although none was
approved in the House. While such performance appears to be low, it happened to
be enough for assuring a loyal part of the electorate who had constructed a
reliable identification with his “authentic and spontaneous” way of
talking.

After his
premature retirement from the Army with a granted military patent of captain,
the politics turned out to be a space of opportunities to safeguard the
economic future of his people. Aware of being a kind of
“spokesperson” of the conservative strand of the society that, by
this time (the 2000s), was enclosed in itself, Bolsonaro would escalate his
style and convert it into a “label”. Although not yet taken seriously
by many in the House and within the society, one of his sons was elected
Councilor of Rio de Janeiro in 2000 with seventeen years old, under the minimum
lega lage to assume the position, replacing his mother, Mrs. Rogéria Bolsonaro.
Not by chance, this was the son who most quickly understood and reproduced the
label: still a teenager, Carlos Bolsonaro held an active discourse in favor of
the civilian armament and the reduction of the criminal age in his campaign. The
Brazilian media evaluates that, currently, he is the one who has the most
influence over the President – what was underpinned by the unexpected dismissal
of Mr. Gustavo Bebbiano, the then Ministry of the General Secretariat of the
Presidency and the President of Bolsonaro’s political party, the Social Liberal
Party. Bolsonaro announced Bebbiano’s removal from office in 18th February,
after an episode of disagreements with Carlos concerning a supposed WhatsApp
(mis)communication between Bebbiano and Bolsonaro. It is argued that the event
in itself might not have rendered Bebbiano’s dismissal if he wouldn’t have been
in continuous disagreements with Carlos since the government’s transitional
period.

Nowadays,
we have Bolsonaro’s three sons occupying positions in the Legislative,
throughout different federal spheres (National Congress and City Hall), and
none of them is in the first mandate1. Therefore, we have a political clan,
i.e., an instance of informal nepotism. Naturally, alongside the core of the
clan constituted by the father and sons, there is an extensive network of
collaborators, friends, and supporters that has been consolidated over the
years. They might recognize themselves as part of a large family, but the core
is tight and well defined. If there is something clear so far within the
Government is that: how many more raise opposition to the core, how many more
may fall out, either removed or resigned. Bolsonaro is then not a politician in
the strict sense of acting towards the common good within the public sphere,
seeking the most prepared ones to tackle the tasks. Besides the episode
encompassing Bebbiano and his second son Carlos, we are collecting
demonstrations of how the hierarchy of the government is built up – as an
example, the third son Eduardo took part at the first official meeting with the
US President Donald Trump, instead of the Chancellor Ernesto Araújo, in
19thMarch.

The
politics is the space that has welcomed Bolsonaro after the Army, in which he
could better act to the benefit of his peoples, i.e., professional, economic
and material guarantees to his family first, then to the network around them.
He has succeeded, as his own plan was just like that personal, simple and clear
compared to other politician’s high ambitions. As President, he has been
keeping his old discursive style – polemic, controversial, authentic (in his
electorate’s words), interventionist and extremist – while strengthening the
label Bolsonaro, which was meant to represent conservatism mainly in religious
and behavioral terms, and actually represents the most significant far-right
authority in Latin America.

Jair Bolsonaro
is from the state of Rio de Janeiro, one of the most violent in Brazil. At the
same time, one with the highest visibility and popularity, perhaps in the
world. The city of Rio de Janeiro (the homonymous state capital) hosted several
international mega-events during the last ten years, ranging from religion (the
first apostolic journey of Pope Francisco, who is born in Argentina, was to RJ,
where he celebrated the World Youth Day in 2013) to culture, sport and
business. Alongside them, it had dramatically increased the number of murders,
armed repression and forced evictions of poor black people from territories
that have turned out to be on the way of those mega-events. Had Bolsonaro been
a politician (again, in the original Greek sense of the term), in facing such
scenario, and considering his strong discourse on public security – favoring an
increase in weapons circulation and military police’s power of action -, he
might have been elected Governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro. However, he is
not. He is solely the leader of a clan, who has never aspired to be the
personification of a national leader.

Here, I
argue, lies the most problematic aspect of the debates concerning the last ten
months of Brazilian politics, assembling the electoral period, the transitional
government and the almost five months of Bolsonaro’s Presidency: the expectation
of an Executive that acts according to the coalition presidentialism is indeed
wavering. Coalition presidentialism has been the regime since the
redemocratization of the country in 1985 with President José Sarney4. There are
two irreconcilable logics at play: on the one side, intellectuals and
pragmatics struggle to find in Bolsonaro’s Presidency plausible elements to
delineate either a strategy or a personality that fits within the overarching
framework of the coalition presidentialism regime. Although nothing resembles
the other five Presidents of the redemocratization period5, there is still a
considered segment of the society committed to explaining the over-reluctant
behavior of the President, which inevitably contaminates the Executive, without
putting the regime itself into question.

On the
other side, the logic of Bolsonaro does uphold the unfolding developments: as
the leader of a conservative clan consisted of white middle-to-upper class
heterosexual men, since his first mandates at the House of Representatives he
plays solely on the customs agenda, openly displaying no sympathy to democratic
principles. He was elected in October 2018 precisely due to such biography and,
over the empty presidential campaign that did not have debates nor a minimum
exposition of a government program, he never held the promise of
diversification. After all, he was not interested in politics, but in raising
polemics about traditions, habits, norms, and myths. His last frictions with
the President of the House, Mr. Rodrigo Maia (of the Democrats Party, which is
center-right and part of the government’s support base), make clear his
complete apathy concerning politics.

He plays
according to his logic, which is instrumentalized by mechanisms able to promote
chaos and polarization – social media, ideological discourses, delegitimation
of the opposition as an interlocutor, empty promises and doubtful declarations
later falsified by the ministers, and a real war against the press.
Nonetheless, chaos and polarization are indeed effective methods to misconduct
a country with 34.5 million informal workers6, more than 12 million of
unemployed7 and 15.3 million people living below the line of extreme poverty8.
As long as press and academic debates keep focused on the failures and
shortcomings of this sixth elected representative of a supposed democratic
coalition presidentialism regime, we all fail.

Therefore,
we urgently need to change the focus and the language, to construct a possible
resistance. The focus, away of Twitter and the partisan dichotomy left-right,
which is in the clan’s usual rhetoric, toward the proper Executive agenda of
reforms and public measures. The language, away of personal adjectives and
aggressive responses, toward an assertive and confrontational oratory related
to the paralysis of the Executive. Here I use the word paralysis referring to
the fact that, with more than ten percent of the term of office spent, we have
no real program for Health, Education, Environment, Human Rights, Culture, Work
and so on. What we have is still a robust ideological plan of action,
replicating the ton used during the campaign. The National Congress is still
recalcitrant with the Pension Reform, which has just gone through the first
round of voting at the Constitution, Justice and Citizenship Commission (CCJ,
in Portuguese) of the House.

Although
the political horizon is still unclear, the present is so far undoubted:
Bolsonaro is not playing by the rules of the coalition presidentialism, neither
is personally attached to the principles of liberal democracy. Bolsonaro has no
clue about how to balance the distribution of functions, roles and positions
among the ministries and state companies, let alone how to manage the
amendments in the budget – recently, the House has approved, in a surprisingly
fast majority of 448 votes vs. 3, the Proposal of Constitutional Emendation
2/2015 known as the “authoritative budget”, which substantially restricts the
government’s power over the allocation of funds. This is seen as a significant
defeat of the Ministry of Economy Paulo Guedes. For Bolsonaro himself – who has
already publicly declared against the Pension Reform which is, in turn, the
main flag of his mandate proposed by one of the two so-called “super
Ministers”, Mr. Guedes – it is all under control.

To
highlight the challenge to so-called coalition presidentialism, I will call
this particular way of managing government, daily affairs, and (anti)politics a
regime of “anti-presidentialism”. Through this specific regime,
Bolsonaro’s government simultaneously control the government and the opposition
mainly through the setting of the agenda – restricted to customs, myths,
contentious issues, and random opinions – employing direct communication with
the population via social media.

He won the
presidential election with 39.3% of the total electorate who went to the poll
and currently needs to preserve the rate of 30% of overall approval to move
forward with the reforms, according to companies of data surveys and to the
economic press. Today, we have 37% of Brazilians that evaluate Bolsonaro
Government as “good”. There is a parcel of the electorate that would
remain loyal to the label Bolsonaro: openly chauvinist, homophobic, sexist,
conservative, interventionist and safeguard of the patriarchal roots of the
Brazilian society. During the Workers Party’s terms (Lula, 2003-2011; Dilma,
2011-mid-2016), this parcel of the electorate – composed mainly by white men of
middle and high economic classes, former militaries and evangelicals – has seen
a double movement going on in the country: on the one hand, the growing and
spread of progressive ideas in the fields of social policies, customs and human
rights, which were celebrated by the low classes who are generally the target
of security forces’ narco-politics. On the other hand, the lowering of purchase
power as an effect of the international economic crisis of 2008 that was felt
hard by the middle class, which is generally the target of austerity measures.

The welfare
policies of President Lula (Bolsa Família, Fome Zero) did not alter the
inequality structure of the country, and there are several plausible critics
about Lula’s double strategy of making poor people and the bourgeoisie
compliant, through providing access to consumer goods and the reconciliation of
conflicting interests, respectively. What is relevant to highlight, however, is
the social consequences of this political articulation undertaken during the
Workers Party’s terms: the rise of gender activism, feminist movements, human
rights advocacy, naming and shaming of racist politicians, and a feeling of
empowerment among the poor people. The silenced low class has become louder and
proud of its color, race, and sexual orientation. The intolerance grew
concomitantly, both among the political-economic elite, and the ordinary people
eager to have the “normal order” back, i.e., privileges of gender,
class, and race.

Political
scientists, journalists, economists and also the political opposition have been
struggling to keep up with the daily twists promoted by Bolsonaro and his team,
to understand them in light of the democratic principles and the coalition
presidentialism regime, which normativity is in effect for the last thirty-four
years of the Brazilian history. That is where I claim they are reinforcing
Bolsonaro’s strategy of resignifying Brazil’s history and reality. Bolsonaro’s
team is, on the one hand, made by a majority of militaries already responsible
for more than one-third of the Ministries that, together, have a budget more
prominent than the Ministry of Health and Education. Naturally, it is
inescapable to cope with the old issue of military hierarchy vs. submission to
civilians, which has been proved difficult in the negotiations of the Pension
Reform.

On the
other hand, the team is made by several people who were entitled due to their
consent and conviction concerning the conservative customs agenda — nothing
beyond that. The Ministers of External Relations, Human Rights & Family,
Environment and Education are the most notable examples of what is at stake for
Bolsonaro: to ideologically resignify the frontline channels of telling
Brazil’s history and reality, inside and outside the country. This agenda has
been featured “anti-intellectualism” by the opposition, denoting precisely
the denial of facts, statistics, studies, and historiography. The ambivalence
is that, even though such denial is already identified, the opposition insists
on the intellectual language to confront such an agenda. That is, while
Bolsonaro speaks his own truths and manifests his conception of the facts (not
the facts themselves), the opposition complains about the lack of accuracy with
numbers and narratives about the trending-topics selected by Bolsonaro himself.

As an
example, the order launched in the last 31st March to celebrate the Military
Coup of 1964 that has initiated the twenty years of the barbaric Brazilian
dictatorship, has prompted a massive reaction within the national and
international societies 9 . We are witnessing an entire miscommunication that,
in the end, has been monopolizing the opposition toward raising a reaction
against nothing with the wrong toolkit, as Bolsonaro does not recognize the
sound of intellectualism. In other words, would not be the national opposition
an echo of Bolsonaro’s anxieties, reverberating his desires and perspectives,
they will start to see a backlash before whom he cares about, the international
market.

I wrap up
this article with the questions concerning the broader change upon the way
Brazilians came to recognize themselves: how is such a shift taking place, who
is it favoring, and what is the likely outcome? I claim that Bolsonaro is a by product
of such change and that it is crucial to highlight the path, the conditions of
possibility for his election and continuous support among still 30% of voters.
I already mentioned above few concrete facts of the Workers Party’s period in
power that contributed to catalyze changes on Brazilians perspectives about
themselves. And I would say that, by no means, we are alone: such changes are
following an international trend of conservatism. However, Bolsonaro is
conservative, to say the least. To be precise, he is located at the far-right
part of the political spectrum, what is an unthinkable image for Brazilians
historians, social scientists and anyone else who has been thinking of the
country since 1985.

Notwithstanding
the traditional assumption of Itamaraty that Brazil is a successful example of
multiculturalism and harmonious coexistence of differences, Brazilians are
carving a deadly version of racism and persistent racial and economic
inequality, as “Black Brazilians earn, on average, 57 percent less than white Brazilians.
They make up 64 percent of the prison population. Brazil’s Congress is 71
percent white”10. Jair Bolsonaro spurs these numbers. His vocabulary is
ideological, and his agenda is no longer part of the progressive path of
emancipation that Brazilians were experiencing. He reinforces an illiberal
democracy in the country, cheating people’s hope of better days and boosting
actual crusades against intellectual discussions and teaching on race, gender,
and sexual orientation. Simultaneously, he speaks out in favor of economic
liberalism, which is a promise to re-establish the pre-2008 living conditions
of the middle class through the privatization of vital national companies.

I named
anti-presidentialism regime all this configuration that encompasses an original
label shaped over Bolsonaro’s years as a Congressman under which his clan
currently acts; a specific language, vocabulary and “functional ignorance” that
works to silence substantiated critics; an exacerbated use of personal social
media as the official communication channel of the Government; an ability to
shape a customs agenda and to monopolize the public engagement around it; and,
lastly, a profound lack of knowledge and skills to employ the instruments of
the coalition presidentialism regime, which he calls “the oldpolitics”.

We are then
reinforcing such anti-presidentialism regime by interacting with its elements,
either misunderstanding or complaining about them, or even being sick of delusion.
Bolsonaro has won more than sixty thousand new followers on Twitter during
Carnaval through the promotion of chaos and polarization with a given video he
posted. In Brazil, there is an elected Congressman who resigned from his third
mandate and is living abroad in 2019; a Councilor who was a relentless human
rights defender brutally murdered in 2018; and uncountable number of
politicians who have occupied high positions in the national or local
governments in prison due to corruption and support to militias. Liberal
democracy is crumbling in Brazil at least since August 2016, with Rousseff´s
controversial impeachment, and civilian restrictions are in a fast track of
enlargement. The latest measure announced by the Minister of Education was to
significantly “decentralized” public funding for superior studies of philosophy,
sociology, and social sciences, as “they do not give an immediate return
to taxpayers”, according to Bolsonaro.

Eduardo,
his third son who is conducting Brazilian foreign policy, seeks for inspiration
among the Hungarian Viktor Órban, the Italian Matteo Salvini, the Israeli
Benjamin Netanyahu, and the North-American Donald Trump. Each manifestation
from those countries’ peoples of non- acceptance of topics of the world
far-right agenda is, after all, an engagement. In Brazil, due to the notorious
unpreparedness of the President, resistance might be more successful by firstly
ignoring posts and tweets of the clan that holds no other goal than to spawn
social chaos. Resistance must require liberal democracy, constitutional rights,
the rule of law and public policies, with expected outcomes and data. We must
pressure the Executive parliamentarians and the media to focus on the
democratic agenda. We must organize ourselves around specific flags such as
funding for superior education and the combat to narco-politics as it is
currently undertaken in favelas, where the state forces drive the genocide of
black people. We cannot engage anymore with Bolsonaro’s strategy that is
constructed, daily, through a discourse of normality. We need to urgently
recover people’s power to shape conceptions of the normal.

America’s Deep-seated and Almost Universal Bigotry

The
Congressional Black Caucus may have found an answer to its Joe Biden dilemma:
Vice President Kamala Harris.

Some black lawmakers are agonizing over whether to
back Biden or two members of the close-knit caucus — Sens. Harris and Cory
Booker — who are also vying for the White House, according to interviews with a
dozen CBC members.

But with the former vice president jumping out to a
huge, if early, lead in the polls, several CBC members are warming to the idea
of a Biden-Harris ticket to take on President Donald Trump.

“That would be a dream ticket for me, a dream
ticket!” said Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.). “If she is not the nominee, that would be
a dream ticket for this country.”

Harris is everything the 76-year-old Biden is not.
The freshman senator from California is younger, a woman and a person of color.
…

America’s billionaires — who love it
when the public are so obsessed with “Blacks versus Whites” or “women versus men”
or other such distinctions amongst the public — hire politicians and
‘news’-media that play up to those distinctions instead of to themselves
versus the public, because this way the public will accept those
billionaires’ controlling the government — as
they do.

Blacks are just as bigoted as Whites,
and women are just as bigoted as men — and that goes also for Jews, Christians,
Muslims, and every other distinction within the public — every other rage by
the public, that’s being redirected away from the billionaires (who virtually
own the government) to being instead against some mass of the public who DON’T control the government, and who AREN’T the cause of this country’s massive
economic inequalities of opportunity, and who DON’T benefit from extending the
American empire by bombs (or otherwise) to Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Libya, and
Syria, and Iran, and Venezuela, and Ukraine, and Russia, etcetera.

Therefore: the first question
that should be asked of every Democratic Presidential candidate isn’t (like it is)
“man or woman?” or “Black or White?” or “Muslim or Christian?” or anything
like that, but instead: Did you vote for the invasion of Iraq, and
of Libya, and for economic sanctions (which are the first step toward declaring
a nation officially as being an ‘enemy’ and thus the first step toward war)
against Iran, and Syria, and Venezuela, and Russia?

Those international hostilities are
just great for the billionaires’ corporations, such as Lockheed Martin, but
they bring billions to the billionaires and nothing but increased taxes and
death and disabilty to the public and to our soldiers — and vastly
worse to the people who live in the tragic lands where we are sanctioning or
invading, or doing regime-change by means of coups. So: they hire the
distractors.

This isn’t to say that Trump isn’t a
racist, but it’s about how the billionaires’ Democratic Party agents who are in
Congress deal with this in such a way that the racist distractionism is on both
sides and drowns-out any authentic progressivism (that being what the
billionaires of both Parties fear). Part of progressivism is an
opposition to regime-change wars — international dictatorship (including not
only invasions but also the earlier stages: economic sanctions, and coups). The
U.S. violates international law whenever it does those, and it does the vast
majority of the ones that are done. The U.S. is thus the last nation in the
world that should be pontificating to other countries. Whenever the U.S.
Government does it, we should all be ashamed of it.

So: the billionaires need the
distractionaires.

The Congressional Black Caucus, according
to Fact Check, as posted in 2008 and never since revised, “has never had a white member in its 36-year history” (and, today,
that would be never in its 47-year history), so that if for example Bernie
Sanders or Pete Buttigieg or maybe even the warmongering Joe Biden himself,
were to apply to join and then be turned down by them, and this were to become
public, then the resultant bad publicity for that Caucus would likely reduce,
instead of increase, that candidate’s standing with black voters. Consequently,
he probably won’t even apply to join.

In any case, being a member of a
victimized group doesn’t mean that one is less bigoted than other groups are.
And who is to say that Americans weren’t bigoted against Iraqis when we did to
them the
catastrophe that we did?

Related

A More Nakedly Aggressive United States

Of all the
instability and unrest the US has been accused of fomenting over the last three
years, no other example comes close to the lengths the US has gone to in its
unilateral attempt at isolating Iran. Long accused by Russia and other major
powers as the leading cause of instability in the Middle East, the recent
escalation of tensions between Iran and the US forms part of a wider more
troubling trend. This has included the US ratcheting up tensions with both
friends and foes alike such as the escalating trade war with China, calls for
regime change in Venezuela and the estrangement of its allies across both the
European Union and NATO.

The last
bit, regarding the US’s growing differences with the EU’s major powers such as
France and Germany is also to a large extent directly linked with its hardline
stance on Iran. This is evident in the clearly divergent stances both the US
and EU have taken regarding Iran’s Nuclear program. President Trump’s
unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) last
year had brought about considerable shock and dismay amidst European powers
that had spent years negotiating the agreement with Iran alongside the US.
Signed back in 2015, the JCPOA had set a historic precedent in international
diplomacy, garnering support from China and Russia as well as the US, UK,
France, Germany and the EU. Based on years of painstaking negotiations it was
widely hailed as presenting a successful model for Nuclear Arms Control and
non-proliferation.

In fact, a
number of experts had hailed the JCPOA as being even better than the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in a number of ways. Its emphasis on monitoring
other research and attempts at nuclear weaponisation beyond the involvement of
nuclear materials was a major step in further expanding the role and scope of
the IAEA’s monitoring mechanisms. These same mechanisms which based on the
consensus of world powers have been successful in both monitoring and limiting
Iran’s attainment of Nuclear weapons capability. The only exception has been
the United States, and particularly the Trump White House that has made it a
policy imperative to undo the years of work put in by both former US President
Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.

President
Obama had even quite recently publicly lamented how reneging on the JCPOA not
only undermined the United States credibility as a negotiating partner, but
also dismantled a whole non-proliferation mechanism that was to prove crucial
in addressing the growing threat from North Korea as well. As apparent in the
failure of the recent talks between the US and North Korea in Vietnam, the US’s
seriousness and commitment to the non-proliferation regime has been openly
questioned as it continues to prioritize its own geo-political imperatives. Its
‘maximum pressure’ campaign on Iran, which is flirting dangerously with yet
another large-scale military conflict involving US armed forces, threatens to
undo the last decades’ painstaking rollback of US troop deployments throughout
the Middle East.

Since the
end of the Cold War, the US’s unilateralism and more maximalist approach was
never in question considering its series of interventions particularly in the
Middle East. There was however a semblance of unity and International
leadership which either under the aegis of the UN or NATO still more or less
carried the garb of a multi-lateral consensus. That instead of simply employing
naked aggression as accused of by its adversaries, the US was justified by its
ideology and the success of its international diplomacy. This perhaps was best
and most positively evident in the JCPOA, which had brought all the world’s
major powers into a concerted agreement on one of the world’s most pressing
issues, namely Nuclear Proliferation.

However, as
the Trump administration beats its war drums to the tune of nothing short of a
regime change in Iran, there is most definitely a marked difference in how the
US has previously built its cases for military intervention in the Middle East.
In the absence of any international support from its partners, or in the lack
of any overarching ideal based on non-Proliferation or plain old human freedoms
(à la Iraq), the recent case for the US military intervention in Iran appears
outright indolent if not unjustified as has mostly been the case with US
hegemony over the last few years.